What Is Brazen Church?

Have you ever looked at your own beliefs and felt like something just didn’t add up? Have you ever felt 90% good about what you were hearing, but for all your attempts to believe, simply couldn’t find peace with the entire thing? Have you ever felt like your church’s priorities were all wrong or that Christians shouldn’t lead such dysfunctional lives?

Welcome to Brazen Church!

We’re a community of Jesus-followers who, at some point or other, realized we had been lied to about God.

It probably wasn’t an intentional lie, but the reality is that when people embrace something as “true”, they tend to filter out information that disagrees with their belief and then impart that belief to those around them.

In our pursuit of God, as we studied Scripture, investigated the teachings of early Church fathers, compared notes on modern theologians, and analyzed Church history, we discovered that man’s view of God has never stopped changing. You might even say it is constantly evolving.

But that’s not what we tend to hear from the church pulpit. Our Western style of Christianity tends to come with a “do not question” sticker attached. Most Christians think of faith as being “blind belief in my interpretation of the Bible” rather than “the evidence of things unseen”.

The reality is that you’ve probably spent your entire life being fed an absolute narrative about God.

You’ve been told God is _____ because Bible Verse _:__ says so.

You’ve been told this is the only correct way of thinking.

You’ve been told this is always what has been considered true.

You’ve been told opposing ideas are just humanistic attempts to reinvent God in man’s image.

You’ve been told that being a Christian is about believing things that don’t make any sense, because God’s ways are higher.

You’ve been told that the world is getting more evil in preparation for Christ’s return and Christians’ escape.

You’ve been told.

Through the many years you’ve spent being told, you may have never considered or even heard of a few startling realities.

The Hebrew language has only 8,700 words (just 1% of total English words as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary). The result is that every word in Biblical Hebrew contains multiple meanings and can be interpreted in multiple ways.

Church leaders have debated and disagreed since the New Testament. Paul and Peter disagreed about the application of circumcision for born-again Gentiles, and the trend of theological disagreement within the Church has never taken a hiatus.

The eschatology you’ve probably been taught, if you come from a Protestant background, was only developed within the last 100 years.

Much of modern theology is derived from the philosophical ideas of Greek Gnosticism, applied to Christian doctrine via St. Augustine. Many of the things you believe to be core pillars of faith can be traced back to Augustine and were not embraced by Church leaders beforehand.

Many of Western Christendom’s stances on economics and politics have nothing to do with Jesus and are much more easily traced to a conservative, capitalistic worldview than a Biblical one.

By all relevant metrics, the world has been gradually becoming a better place to live. Driven by “humanistic” ideas, poverty rates decrease every year, child mortality has dramatically decreased worldwide, and the world is living at a higher standard of living, on average, than ever before.

Why are we telling you this?

Because the reality of God and life is much less defined than any of us have been taught, and the more you learn, the more you understand how little you know.

Some will bury their heads and continue to subscribe to their narratives.

But for those who truly believe Jesus is “The Truth”, we know that pursuing truth can only bring us closer to Him.

That’s the entire point of Brazen Church. We believe it’s time to set Jesus free from the shackles of absolute narratives. Our goal is to break apart longstanding lies about God, so we can find Truth in the rubble.

Join Us On The Journey!

If that sounds like something you’re up for, join us on our journey by subscribing to our mailing list. We’ll send you brief, non-clickbait emails whenever we create something amazing for you to read.

Have a question, an answer, or simply a desire to learn from the community? Click here to check out our Q&A forum.

The Team

Get to know the individuals who make up the Brazen Church team.

Jacob Wright

I grew up in a community birthed out of the Jesus movement of the 60’s and 70’s. My dad, who was deeply involved in the psychedelic drug culture of the 60’s, had a spiritual awakening to Jesus through a series of trances, angelic visitations, and explosive encounters with God.

It wasn’t until I was 16 that I had my first awakening to God. After burning through “No Compromise”, the life-story of the late Keith Green, I found myself weeping uncontrollably. A fire was lit in my heart that utterly consumed me with hunger for reality, for truth, for God – not for the surface kind of truth that just suits a little temporary need to validate what I already have been conditioned into believing – but the deep questions that require deeper answers, taking into account real human, global, cosmic, and existential questions.

Jacob McMillen

I grew up in an insanely supernatural environment. I witnessed many dramatic healings and creative miracles at a young age, both in person and via videotapes of our church’s global ministry. I knew the voice of God from a young age, and I was determined to be the greatest Christian who ever lived.

When our church imploded, as they so often seem to do, my family moved across the country, and I found myself searching for like-minded community, while working hard to become the type of holy, set apart individual God could use in the way I had grown up witnessing. My struggle was in vain. While by most accounts, I was doing everything right, I could never reach my own standard of holiness, let alone God’s.

After enrolling in a charismatic ministry school, I began to understand that it is not my job to convict myself of sin and righteous, but the Holy Spirit’s. I began to see that Jesus came to give me abundant life and reveal the Father, and it was in this revelation that I began embracing and enjoying life for the first time. While I still have a high value to see the Holy Spirit move in supernatural ways, I’ve come to believe that it’s even better to create environments that sustain physical, spiritual, and emotional health than it is to receive supernatural “fixes” to problems we continuously create. This is my vision for the future of Christianity and the world at large.